“We better get up,” I say, “she might want to make up the room.”

We’re waiting for the bus. They lied to me in the general store, there is a hotel, I can see it now, it’s just around the corner. We’ve had our quarrel, argument, fight, the one we were counting on. It was a routine one, a small one comparatively, its only importance the fact that it was the last. It carries the weight of all the other, larger things we said we forgave each other for but didn’t. If there were separate buses we’d take them. As it is we wait together, standing a little apart.

We have over half an hour. “Let’s go down to the beach,” I say. “We can see the bus from there; it has to go the other way first.” I cross the road and he follows me at a distance.

There’s a wall; I climb it and sit down. The top is scattered with sharp flakes of broken stone, flint possibly, and bleached thumbnail-sized cockleshells, I know what they are because I saw them in the museum two days ago, and the occasional piece of broken glass. He leans against the wall near me, chewing on a cigarette. We say what we have to say in even, conversational voices, discussing how we’ll get back, the available trains. I wasn’t expecting it so soon.

After a while he looks at his watch, then walks away from me towards the sea, his boots crunching on the shells and pebbles. At the edge of the reed bank by the river he stops, back to me, one leg slightly bent. He holds his elbows, wrapped in his clothes as though in a cape, the storm breaks, his cape billows, thick leather boots sprout up his legs, a sword springs to attention in his hand. He throws his head back, courage, he’ll meet them alone. Flash of lightning. Onward.

I wish I could do it so quickly. I sit calmed, frozen, not yet sure whether I’ve survived, the words we have hurled at each other lying spread in fragments around me, solidified. It’s the pause during the end of the world; how does one behave? The man who said he’d continue to tend his garden, does that make sense to me? It would if it were only a small ending, my own. But we aren’t more doomed than anything else, it’s dead already, at any moment the bay will vaporize, the hills across will lift into the air, the space between will scroll itself up and vanish; in the graveyard the graves will open to show the dry puffball skulls, his wooden cross will flare like a match, his house collapse into itself, cardboard and lumber, no more language. He will stand revealed, history scaling away from him, the versions of him I made up and applied, stripped down to what he really is for a last instant before he flames up and goes out. Surely we should be holding each other, absolving, repenting, saying goodbye to each other, to everything because we will never find it again.

Above us the gulls wheel and ride, crying like drowning puppies or disconsolate angels. They have black rims around their eyes; they’re a new kind, I’ve never seen any like that before. The tide is going out; the fresh wet mud gleams in the sun, miles of it, a level field of pure glass, pure gold. He stands outlined against it; a dark shape, faceless, light catching the edges of his hair.

I turn aside and look down at my hands. They are covered with greyish dust: I’ve been digging among the shells, gathering them together. I arrange them in a border, a square, each white shell overlapping the next. Inside I plant the flints, upright in tidy rows, like teeth, like flowers.

The way they’re going on about it in the magazines you’d think it was just invented, and not only that but it’s something terrific, like a vaccine for cancer. They put it in capital letters on the front cover, and inside they have these questionnaires like the ones they used to have about whether you were a good enough wife or an endomorph or an ectomorph, remember that? with the scoring upside down on page 73, and then these numbered do-it-yourself dealies, you know? RAPE, TEN THINGS TO DO ABOUT IT, like it was ten new hairdos or something. I mean, what’s so new about it?

So at work they all have to talk about it because no matter what magazine you open, there it is, staring you right between the eyes, and they’re beginning to have it on the television, too. Personally I’d prefer a June Allyson movie anytime but they don’t make them any more and they don’t even have them that much on the Late Show. For instance, day before yesterday, that would be Wednesday, thank god it’s Friday as they say, we were sitting around in the women’s lunch room—the lunch room, I mean you’d think you could get some peace and quiet in there—and Chrissy closes up the magazine she’s been reading and says, “How about it, girls, do you have rape fantasies?”

The four of us were having our game of bridge the way we always do, and I had a bare twelve points counting the singleton with not that much of a bid in anything. So I said one club, hoping Sondra would remember about the one club convention, because the time before when I used that she thought I really meant clubs and she bid us up to three, and all I had was four little ones with nothing higher than a six, and we went down two and on top of that we were vulnerable. She is not the world’s best bridge player. I mean, neither am I but there’s a limit.

Darlene passed but the damage was done, Sondra’s head went round like it was on ball bearings and she said, “What fantasies?”

“Rape fantasies,” Chrissy said. She’s a receptionist and she looks like one; she’s pretty but cool as a cucumber, like she’s been painted all over with nail polish, if you know what I mean. Varnished. “It says here all women have rape fantasies.”

“For Chrissake, I’m eating an egg sandwich,” I said, “and I bid one club and Darlene passed.”

“You mean, like some guy jumping you in an alley or something,” Sondra said. She was eating her lunch, we all eat our lunches during the game, and she bit into a piece of that celery she always brings and started to chew away on it with this thoughtful expression in her eyes and I knew we might as well pack it in as far as the game was concerned.

“Yeah, sort of like that,” Chrissy said. She was blushing a little, you could see it even under her makeup.

“I don’t think you should go out alone at night,” Darlene said, “you put yourself in a position,” and I may have been mistaken but she was looking at me. She’s the oldest, she’s forty-one though you wouldn’t know it and neither does she, but I looked it up in the employees’ file. I like to guess a person’s age and then look it up to see if I’m right. I let myself have an extra pack of cigarettes if I am, though I’m trying to cut down. I figure it’s harmless as long as you don’t tell. I mean, not everyone has access to that file, it’s more or less confidential. But it’s all right if I tell you, I don’t expect you’ll ever meet her, though you never know, it’s a small world. Anyway.

“For heaven’s sake, it’s only Toronto,” Greta said. She worked in Detroit for three years and she never lets you forget it, it’s like she thinks she’s a war hero or something, we should all admire her just for the fact that she’s still walking this earth, though she was really living in Windsor the whole time, she just worked in Detroit. Which for me doesn’t really count. It’s where you sleep, right?

“Well, do you?” Chrissy said. She was obviously trying to tell us about hers but she wasn’t about to go first, she’s cautious, that one.

“I certainly don’t,” Darlene said, and she wrinkled up her nose, like this, and I had to laugh. “I think it’s disgusting.” She’s divorced, I read that in the file too, she never talks about it. It must’ve been years ago anyway. She got up and went over to the coffee machine and turned her back on us as though she wasn’t going to have anything more to do with it.